Projectories

In the largest Swedish newspaper today there is an article about mathematics making you a better student. I’m quite surprised that the journalist doesn’t seem to have a clue about the difference between correlation and causality.

According to the journalist, the research showed that students that attended three years of math in high school had better grades in biology, chemistry, and physics at the university. The question is: does three years of math make you a better student, or do better students (more motivated, smarter, more supported from home, etc.) to a higher degree choose three years of math? If you ask this question it might not be a question of causality, but of correlation.

In my high-school, all the motivated students selected certain subjects, while all the slackers chose others ? just because the subjects had a reputation for being a slacker subject, or a hard-worker-subject.

So there was a correlation between being a hard worker and choosing certain subjects, not necessarily a causality between attending certain subjects and becoming a better student.

Please, DN, before putting something on the first page, get your argumentation straight.

I have for a long time thought about writing about when my colleagues finish their defence, and become PhD’s. Well I seem to have forgotten about that in the thick of battle during the semester. Well, now I’m going to start backblogging.

The last dissertation I wrote about was Petra Jonvallen’s book Testing Pills, Enacting Obesity, the next one written in English from the department is Corinna Kruse’s The Making of Valid Data. People and Machines in Genetic Research Practice, which was defended on the 22 of September 2007.

Corinna’s dissertation is a multisited laboratory ethnography about how ‘samples are turned into data that is considered valid and useful by the research community.’ The dissertation dives into machines, norms, ideals, skills, as well as validity, agency reproducibility.

Theoretically Corinna’s study draws on Bruno Latour’s popular concept of immutable mobiles and Karen Barad’s framework of agential realism to discuss ‘various notions of humanness and machineness which shaped scientists’ practices and made the creation of valid data possible.’

A long-time overdue, Congratulations Corinna!

At the moment I’m starting work on new empirical material, which I hope will yield insights into the discourse of contemporary distance education. The empirical material consists of about 300 articles in PDF-format, a quite large amount of data.

I’m in the process of trying to find quantitative text-analysis software for analyzing these articles for trends in the data (preferably with the possibility to group different documents) for the purpose of providing input to a deeper qualitative analysis of a selection of the documents.

So far I’ve come up with the following freeware programs for Windows. Any other suggestions, please leave a tip in the comments.

TextSTAT

Kwic Concordance 

AntConc

Simple Concordance Program 

ConcApp 

Kwicfinder

Xaira

Poliqarp

MLCT: Multilingual Corpus Toolkit

CorpusSearch

aConcorde